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Bard Graduate Center is an advanced graduate research institute in New York City dedicated to the cultural histories of the material world. Our MA and PhD degree programs, Gallery exhibitions, research initiatives, scholarly publications and public programs explore new ways of thinking about decorative arts, design history, and material culture.

MA/PhD
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Applications for our MA program may be submitted until March 1, 2025





MA/PhD

As an institute for advanced study of the cultural history of the material world, Bard Graduate Center is defined by the way it relates teaching, research, and exhibitions.

Photo by Da Ping Luo.

At the center of our field of vision is the material world—the ways it has shaped human experience and relationships in the past, and how the past informs the present and future in new or unexpected ways. Bard Graduate Center shares an intellectual foundation with innovative and transdisciplinary historical schools that emerged in the early twentieth century. Our mission is to develop new approaches to social and cultural history informed by material things as well as by textual sources. Even further back lies the work of collectors, connoisseurs, and antiquarians who were among the first scholars to take objects seriously as both evidentiary and aesthetic documents. These lineages are relevant for our study of all regions of the world, and underpin our broad global and chronological scope. Graduate education in small group seminars is informed by faculty research. Many of our exhibitions are also faculty-initiated and developed through dedicated research seminars and direct student participation.

Teaching – Research – Exhibitions
Bard Graduate Center’s encyclopedic breadth is articulated along the axes of geography, chronology, materials, and methods. Faculty members are drawn from the fields of anthropology, archaeology, art history, history, materials science, and philosophy, while our students come from an even wider range of undergraduate majors. Visiting researchers, co-instructors, and speakers connect students and faculty with colleagues and like-minded institutions around the world. Our curriculum offers unique, hands-on opportunities to study an array of material culture in a variety of settings. An expanding Study Collection makes diverse items of global material culture available for close examination, research, and classroom use. Relationships with curatorial and conservation colleagues in New York museums (our extended “Cultural Sciences Campus”) enable onsite visits for classes and individual students. BGC has partnered in the creation and implementation of exhibitions with major institutions, including the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Our summer travel program, often anchored by international partnerships in France and Greece, augments the curriculum with site-specific visits, research, and first-hand experience in collections and archaeological field methods. This expansive vision is supported by two departments that prepare our students to engage in widely accessible forms of scholarship and that help extend BGC’s footprint well beyond West 86th Street: Digital Humanities/Exhibitions, which coordinates the production of digital research and exhibition projects; and Public Humanities + Research, which programs an ambitious roster of visiting fellowships, lectures, symposia, gallery tours, workshops, performances, and events.

Combining the freedom and focus of a specialist institute with the teaching, research, and gallery resources of larger academic and museum institutions, Bard Graduate Center integrates object-based learning with cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary inquiry.
Welcome Letter from the Director
Bard Graduate Center opened its doors in the fall of 1993. Early on I expressed my conviction that “the aspirations and habits of civilization are revealed through the decorative arts, which are fundamental to the lives of all individuals,” and my hope that the Center would help “advance the recognition of the decorative arts as one of the primary expressions of human achievement.” Since then, Bard Graduate Center has more than fulfilled these original aspirations, uniting innovative degree programs with path-breaking museum exhibitions to create a new context for the study of a significant portion of the artistic heritage of human history. As we have added new faculty and new foci, we have also broadened our horizons and our self description. Our even more ambitious aim now is to become the leading center for the study of the cultural history of the material world. Bard Graduate Center’s first three decades were truly amazing. And all of us here—faculty, staff, and students—eagerly look forward to what the next decades will bring. We hope you will want to join us.


Susan Weber
Founder and Director
Areas of Special Strength
Within our global and transhistorical focus on the material world, our current faculty resources and worldwide institutional partnerships make us particularly robust in ten overlapping areas of special strength: Each of these areas are flexible and draw on the changing interests and expertise of our permanent faculty members, as well as postdoctoral fellows and visiting instructors from our New York “Cultural Sciences Campus.” They are reflected in course offerings as well as recurring faculty-programmed research events. Rather than constituting defined or official tracks through our curriculum, these ten areas of special strength offer our students productive points of reference for a broad exploration of history and culture through their tangible and material traces.



Science and Sylvester Manor

Sylvester Manor is a Georgian-era plantation home on Shelter Island, New York that was built in 1652 to act as a provisioning plantation for the Barbados sugar trade. The Manor was founded as the home of the Dutch merchant Nathaniel Sylvester, the first European inhabitant of the island. Remarkably, it has been in the same family for eleven generations. The current Manor dates to 1737, and serves as a museum and site for archaeological exploration of the lives of the enslaved Africans, Dutch plantation owners, and native Americans who intersected on this land during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The home’s collections include silver, paintings, furniture, wallpaper, ceramics, documents, and architectural elements that range from the seventeenth century to the present day. This class will provide an introduction to the scientific study of material culture, using the Manor and its collections to demonstrate how materials analysis can inform humanities scholars about the past. For example, the silver collections of the Manor will be examined to explore their relationships to the Dutch and English silver standards of the period, and the ‘coin silver’ alloys that were prepared in the American colonies using Spanish Reales from Peruvian, Mexican, and Bolivian mines. The silver sources identified will allow BGC students to be the first to let the Manor collections “speak for themselves,” probing the extent of the trade network that took place at this rare and remarkable survival of a Northern plantation. This course will involve two visits to Shelter Island, Long Island. The first trip will be to learn about the Manor and its collections, and to review possible research project options. The second trip will be to collect data and samples for your semester-long research project. Your project will be presented at the end of the semester as the course’s final paper. Shelter Island, located on the east end of Long Island between the North and South forks, is a three-hour trip from Manhattan. As a result, the two classes that happen at the Manor will take place on weekend days to avoid conflicts with other classes. These day trips can be extended to overnight trips to the island depending upon the class’s preference. 3 credits.